BUFFR's spectral view draws an FFT heatmap at sizes up to 16384, and Alt-dragging a rectangle across it selects time and frequency together. A normal drag does not. Drag the usual way, and you get every sound that happened in that stretch, which in a long capture is usually four things at once.
That distinction is the whole feature. Two hours of retained audio is dense by definition, full of overlapping takes, chair noise, half-finished loops, and whatever the desktop lane picked up while you worked. The bit you actually want is rarely alone in its own moment.
Getting there takes one click. Switch the audio view from waveform to spectral, scroll to zoom, and middle-drag to pan around. The spectrogram streams while recording at every zoom level, so you are looking at live detail rather than waiting for a render after the fact.
Preview it before you commit. Pressing Space over a lane auditions the selection, and holding Space loops it, which is how you find out whether the box is tight enough or has clipped the tail off a decay. Drag the edges to refine and listen again.
Once the band sounds right, it leaves as real audio. You can drag it into the DAW timeline, into another instance, or straight to the desktop, and the isolated material behaves like any other file from there.
Nothing here is a permanent decision. Try all three on the same box and listen, because the right answer depends on whether the source is percussive or sustained, and you cannot predict that from looking at the heatmap. Percussive material tends to punish smearing. Sustained material rarely notices it.
The offline Spectral processor is a separate tool from the grab and worth keeping straight. It adds frequency contrast across a selection rather than isolating a band, auditions dry against wet before you commit, and writes results into BUFFR's own buffer without touching your DAW's signal path. The ghosted originals behind every timing edit work on the same principle over on the MIDI side, so an edit you regret is a step backward rather than a lost take.
Zoom level changes what you can see, and that is a real tradeoff rather than a preference. A large FFT size resolves frequency finely and time coarsely, which suits sustained tones, held chords, and hum. Smaller sizes sharpen the timing at the cost of frequency detail, which is what you want when the target is a click or a snare hit sitting inside a mix.
Isolating one sound inside a busy mix is easier when you scoped it earlier. Markers dropped during the session, whether by keystroke or from a spare pad, become snap targets in the spectral view too, so the box starts near the right bar rather than somewhere in the general vicinity. Spectrogram caching handles the zooming without stalling, which matters when the history you are combing through runs to the full 120 minutes.
That distinction is the whole feature. Two hours of retained audio is dense by definition, full of overlapping takes, chair noise, half-finished loops, and whatever the desktop lane picked up while you worked. The bit you actually want is rarely alone in its own moment.
Getting there takes one click. Switch the audio view from waveform to spectral, scroll to zoom, and middle-drag to pan around. The spectrogram streams while recording at every zoom level, so you are looking at live detail rather than waiting for a render after the fact.
A rectangle finds things a time selection cannot
Hold Alt and drag a box around the region you want, bounded by time on one axis and frequency on the other. Everything outside the box stays behind. That gets you a single note buried under a pad, one overtone from a stacked chord, a click that landed on top of a good phrase, or the low rumble of somebody moving in the room.Preview it before you commit. Pressing Space over a lane auditions the selection, and holding Space loops it, which is how you find out whether the box is tight enough or has clipped the tail off a decay. Drag the edges to refine and listen again.
Once the band sounds right, it leaves as real audio. You can drag it into the DAW timeline, into another instance, or straight to the desktop, and the isolated material behaves like any other file from there.
Your reconstruction choice decides what the leftovers sound like
Three reconstruction options sit behind the grab. FFT is the plain resynthesis path. MIN runs minimum-phase reconstruction, keeping energy tucked behind the transient. LIN runs linear-phase, which preserves phase relationships across the band at the cost of some pre-ringing ahead of sharp attacks.Nothing here is a permanent decision. Try all three on the same box and listen, because the right answer depends on whether the source is percussive or sustained, and you cannot predict that from looking at the heatmap. Percussive material tends to punish smearing. Sustained material rarely notices it.
The offline Spectral processor is a separate tool from the grab and worth keeping straight. It adds frequency contrast across a selection rather than isolating a band, auditions dry against wet before you commit, and writes results into BUFFR's own buffer without touching your DAW's signal path. The ghosted originals behind every timing edit work on the same principle over on the MIDI side, so an edit you regret is a step backward rather than a lost take.
Finding the moment matters more than the grab itself
Snap does the heavy lifting once you know roughly where you are. It pulls targets from your DAW's bars and beats, from audio transients, from zero crossings, from your own markers, and from MIDI note positions, so the box edges land somewhere musical instead of wherever the mouse stopped. Hold Shift while dragging an edge and snap steps out of the way.Zoom level changes what you can see, and that is a real tradeoff rather than a preference. A large FFT size resolves frequency finely and time coarsely, which suits sustained tones, held chords, and hum. Smaller sizes sharpen the timing at the cost of frequency detail, which is what you want when the target is a click or a snare hit sitting inside a mix.
Isolating one sound inside a busy mix is easier when you scoped it earlier. Markers dropped during the session, whether by keystroke or from a spare pad, become snap targets in the spectral view too, so the box starts near the right bar rather than somewhere in the general vicinity. Spectrogram caching handles the zooming without stalling, which matters when the history you are combing through runs to the full 120 minutes.
